Forge of Legends: December Developer Update

by Joost "Myrthos" Mans, 2012-12-27

The last few months have been busy for Forge of Legends development. One of my goals has been to bring together the various pieces of the game into something that is playable. For nearly a year I've had the core game engine, data, and a few scraps of user interface completed. I've decided it's time to make a push toward joining these pieces together into something I can show to players and testers.

While I am still a long way from a beta or a true demo, the creation of something I can give to people and that can be "played" is an important milestone. If nothing else, it gives me concrete coding goals and helps me stay on track. To avoid any confusion with my progress being called a "demo," I'm referring to it with the less-exciting name "dev snapshot."

In order to be able to deliver snapshots, I've had to focus more effort on the user interface. In particular, character creation and guild management. You may recall from previousForge of Legends information that the game centers on the "guild" as a game concept. Specifically, you create characters and add them to your guild's roster. Then, you can move characters from your roster to an adventuring party, which you then send out on missions. This has required a lot of buttons, drop-downs, and other less-exciting work.

I am discovering that this kind of UI coding requires more self-discipline than the "fun" coding of creating races, classes, spells, and even combat mechanics. Positioning elements on the screen is an art in itself, and I've found myself reworking screens I thought were finished more than once. That being said, I'm happy to announce that I've made great progress in this area! Here are some new screenshots for character creation and guild management that attest to this:

With the completion of these screens, I was able to create a dev snapshot and deliver it to a small group of testers. While NOT a demo, it is more-or-less playable, though I would describe it as very very early and certainly not even at an alpha stage yet. Here is some of the feedback I've gotten from testers:

"It was great fun! I was surprised how polished it felt, considering there is still about a year left of work on it. And the combat worked well. It was very strategic and much more fun than so many other turn-based RPGs".

And yes, I AM glossing over the giant list of bugs and this-would-be-better-ifs that came out of this dev snapshot.

I should also mention that while going through the process of character creation, I flushed out considerably more detail on character classes, races, and subraces. This detail is accessible during character creation, but I have also updated the Forge of Legends website with the new information on classes and races.

And finally, I have recorded a short video showing a taste of what I provided in the dev snapshot. While I am not making the current dev snapshot public, a bit of what it contained can be viewed in the video.